By Heather Lusk
Kindergartners at Union Elementary kicked off a month of learning about kindness by collecting pajamas to be donated to The Villages, an organization providing foster care, adoption and family services.
According to the “Kindergarten Jammie Count” as tallied by the students, 271 pajamas were donated by the entire elementary school. Last year donations came only from the five kindergarten classes, and they collected fewer than 100 jammies. Kindergarten teacher Brooke Sorgen saw a greater need for The Villages this year and the kindergarteners rallied the other students to donate.
“Some people don’t have warm pajamas, so we wanted to give them some,” said six-year-old Nicholas Brady. He said that he donated his stuffed animals to others previously but was much happier to donate pajamas because they hadn’t belonged to him.
“A lot of kids don’t realize the need of others to have a warm and cuddly bed,” said kindergarten teacher Emily Cravens.
“They don’t think of donating something as simple as jammies,” Sorgen said.
Throughout the month the children are also thinking of other ways to be kind. A bulletin board suggests ways that the students can show kindness such as helping someone at recess who has fallen, reading to a sibling or telling someone they love them.
Cravens said the children incorporated a variety of skills to execute the pajama drive from writing announcements to drawing advertising posters to sorting the donations by age appropriateness.
With the success of this year’s drive, the teachers anticipate continuing the collection again next year.
“It’s really teaching the kids a lot,” Sorgen said.
The Villages is Indiana’s largest not-for-profit child and family agency serving 11,000 children each year.
